Up the hill from Karakoy, a funicular ride away, is Taksim Square and the Taksim Gezi Park just north of it, which made news around the world for the series of huge protests against Erdogan a few years ago. It’s the first day of Ramadan and the square is crowded. Workers are busily setting up tables & chairs in front of a stage. A man tells me that they’re going to be providing free food when it’s time to break fast that evening.
‘Free?’
‘Yes, free for everyone. Even you can go and eat if you fast.’
That evening, after some speeches from the stage, music blares through the speakers around the square. At sunset they allow people into the enclosed dining area. It’s more like the langar in a Sikh gurudwara than a Thanksgiving dinner at a homeless shelter. Multiple waves of people go in, accept packaged boxes of food, and eat with family & friends. When all is said and done that evening probably upwards of 4000 people were fed.
The pedestrian street leading north, skirting the park, is lined with street vendors selling books, artisanal soaps & perfumes, Turkish delight and ice cream. On a makeshift stage a couple is performing what sounds like sufi music, the man singing & playing the santur, and the woman playing what looks like a bendir (or perhaps it’s a daf). They play for what seems to be the entire evening, their meditative music audible even in the square.
As I sit on some steps listening to a young band, a Filipina, passing by, asks me if I speak Turkish since she needed help with something. I shake my head. She sighs and sits down on the step beside me. Her face is prematurely wrinkled, her hands rough from a life of working with her hands. We listen to the lively music. After a polite period of silence, she opens up and starts telling me about her life.
She’s a live-in nanny for a rich business family with three children. The mother is Turkish, the father French. They live in a swanky part of Istanbul. They also own an 8-bedroom holiday villa in Bodrum by the Aegean Sea where they spend their summers. She says she works 14 hours a day, 6 days a week. On the seventh day, she works part-time for another family. This is one of her rare evenings out.
‘How did you end up in Turkey?’
‘I worked as a nanny in Israel. There I met a Russian family and moved to Moscow for a few months. But I didn’t get my papers, so the Russian family introduced me to their friends living in London. They were moving to Istanbul & needed a nanny. They got me the necessary papers.’
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Three years.’
‘And you still don’t speak any Turkish?’
The woman smiles sheepishly. ‘It’s very hard. Not like English.’ Then she continues, ‘I’m very grateful to the family. But I’m bored. I want to leave and find another job. But I don’t know how to tell them.’
‘Why?’
‘The children love me. They cannot do without me. I’ve been with the family for six years, three of them in London. The younger children know me from birth. I’m the one who puts them to bed at night and wakes them up in the morning. I feed them, bathe them, take them to school, do everything for them. I give them freedom, but I also set strict limits. They listen to me. They’re attached to me. But I also have to be careful. I need them to love me enough for them to want me, so that I can have my job. But not so much that the mother gets jealous and gets rid of me.’
For some reason I find the politics of being a live-in nanny very interesting. I didn’t realize that the job requires as much diplomatic skills as it does the ability to love kids who are not yours and yet not being exhausted by the need to be constantly attending to them.
She then gets up, ready to leave. ‘It was nice talking to you, mister. I don’t get to talk to people other than the family I work for. So it’s nice to be able to talk to someone else.’ I detect some sadness in her voice. She’s alone & isolated in a country she does not understand, nor feels at home in. ‘Good luck with your travels. And take care, okay?’ Shen then brightens up and smiles. ‘Now I go back home and eat some rice! We Filipinos just can’t live without our rice!’ She laughs and walks away into the night.
